Accessible Linked Cards

Method for developing clickable linked cards without sacrificing the user experience for screen reader users

Having entire cards be their own clickable links is a common design pattern. However, housing an entire card’s worth of information within an <a> tag can be problematic for users with screen readers, as the screen reader will read out the entire contents of the <a> tag. This is typically overly verbose and contains a lot of unnecessary information.

The below solution sidesteps this problem. By encapsulating only a card’s title/heading in the <a> tag, we ensure the screen reader is only reading out the meaningful link content. Then, by using the data-click attribute we can pass all card clicks through to the link, successfully navigating to the desired endpoint.